The preparatory negotiations for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP29, which will take place in November in Baku, Azerbaijan, concluded on Thursday in Bonn, Germany.
The two-week meeting was marked by a strong division between developed and developing countries, leading to minimal progress on the main negotiation topic this year: defining a New Collective Quantified Climate Finance Goal (NCQG) to replace the $100 billion annually that rich countries promised but failed to deliver to promote climate action in the global south.
The disagreements mainly revolve around two key aspects: quality and quantity. Countries like Brazil are demanding a qualitative definition of what constitutes climate finance. This is because wealthy nations tend to include loans, even those from private sources with market interest rates, which have contributed to the indebtedness of poorer nations. The developing countries, on the other hand, are calling for financing primarily from public sources, in the form of grants and highly concessional terms from the Global North, historically the biggest polluter.
Bonn was unable to produce a text to serve as a basis for future negotiations
The quantity of resources to be made available is also a point of contention. Negotiators from developing countries proposed amounts in the range of $1 trillion annually starting from 2025. However, the countries expected to foot the bill have not put forward any figures.
As a result, Bonn was unable to produce a text to serve as a basis for future negotiations. If the technical deadlock persists at the political level, an agreement on an NCQG may not be reached this year.
This would be bad news for the developing world, which urgently needs substantial resources to promote climate mitigation and adaptation, as well as to address the losses and damages caused by extreme weather events. For Brazil, without a robust climate finance goal, the path to COP30 in Belém will be challenging.
Therefore, it is crucial for Brazilian diplomacy to take a leadership role in breaking the impasse on the two key aspects within the UN Climate Change Convention and also contribute to solutions beyond it. As the president of the G20, Brazil needs to encourage concrete outcomes regarding the reform of the international financial architecture, debt forgiveness and fair renegotiation for heavily indebted countries, as well as solutions such as a global tax on the wealth of the super-rich. All these efforts should focus on ensuring that developed countries provide financing of the necessary quality and quantity to ensure a global transition towards sustainable and socially just economies.